Platform and Purpose

Finished reading Subroto Bagchi’s “The Professional: Defining the New Standard of Excellence at Work“. Simple anecdotes bring out very powerful messages. Messages which all of us intuitively know as being right but somehow which don’t sink in. This is not a book review or a synopsis but just a diagrammatic representation of one of the summary chapters towards the end of the book. Basically, active workers have been clubbed into quadrants, each of which is defined by a unique combination of platform and purpose. “Platform” here refers to the silver spoons you get in life, the ‘leg up’ your education and social status provides you etc. “Purpose” refers to the methods you follow to act out your professional destiny on the platform given to you.

Something like that. So I depicted the sense I got through the chart below. I think I am in the blue quadrant as a “Pretentiously intellectual but pathetically ineffective” specimen!!!

I guess a good station in life is rare and many of us are in the high platform but low purpose realm. It appears from the book that the probability of moving over to the high purpose | high platform quadrant from the low purpose | high platform is higher than the probability of getting there from the high purpose | low platform quadrant. Ergo, the bases have to be high/low for the transition probabilities to be low/high and therefore both logically and emperically, it appears that the volume distribution of workers among each of these looks like the below. Very few people in the high purpose and high platform quadrant really.